#50GreatestConcerts: Patti Smith Group and Television, 1975
Rock history was being made at CBGB, a club with no dressing rooms and an incontinent dog in residence
Patti Smith in the 1970s. Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
Over a two-month-long residency, the Patti Smith Group went from art project to formidable band ”“ and lower Manhattan’s CBGB was well on the road to becoming one of the most famous rock clubs in the world. Much of the material that ended up on Smith’s debut, Horses, came to life at CB’s, with Smith improvising poetic chants as the band brutalized simple chord patterns. “CBGB was the ideal place to sound a clarion call,” Smith wrote.
Television, meanwhile, had just begun emphasizing the guitar-weaving tapestries they would immortalize on Marquee Moon. Rock history was being made at a club with no dressing rooms and an incontinent dog in residence ”“ and the musicians knew it. “I remember one night standing outside CBGB, in the doorway of the derelict hotel next door, smoking a joint,” says Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, “and realizing that this was the kind of gathering of psychic energies I’d always dreamed of when, say, I would read about the San Francisco scene in 1966.”
Click here to check out the entire story in the digital edition of Rolling Stone India.Â
Hear the Patti Smith Group and Television perform at CBGB in 1975 below:
